Halsted M. Bernard

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Halsted M. Bernard is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. Her writing has appeared in Innsmouth Magazine, Map Literary, and Bewildering Stories, and she is a member of literary writing and spoken-word performance group Writers' Bloc. For more about Halsted's publications and performances, please see her "Fiction" page.

Disclaimer

The opinions and views expressed therein are solely my own and not of any organization or employer.

In the corner of the bookstore.

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I love going to Powell’s, especially for the moment when I’ve found a few books and I curl up in a corner somewhere to pore over my choices, to turn them over in my hands and see how they feel as orbiting objects in my small universe. This time it was a well-loved used copy of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and a well-liked used copy of Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things”.

I don’t remember reading “In Cold Blood” although I find it impossible to have existed this long as a reader and writer without doing so. I definitely haven’t read “The God of Small Things” before now, but became curious after my mom sent me a sampling of Roy’s prose in a text message:

”The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds—blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows, coups d’état, hairstyles stiff with hair spray. Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming.”

Impossible to resist, as impossible as the corner of Powell’s in the Blue Room, near the local ‘zines, where all that potential and possibility rests on its haunches, ready to launch.